I played this as a kid and all I remember is a very weird experience. Playing it today and it's not very weird. Kinda wish it measured up to my memories of it, but what ever really does?
You collect items that you can use through out the stage and you also shoot balls at monsters. One of the items is a ladder, which is pretty self-explanatory (you climb it to reach higher spots); another lets you jump higher; there's a bomb which might be for blowing up enemies, I don't know. You also collect "K" blocks which are basically Mario coins. Not sure what they do, but I'm amazed they made all sorts of configurations out of them but still managed to never put three Ks in a row... ahem.
(I take that back)
It plays perfectly fine, you can get pretty powerful pretty fast if you collect three balls to shooty with. I think the weirdest aspect of this is that they brought this guy back as a boss in Bad Dudes vs DragonNinja and made him the last boss in Fighter's Destiny: Karnov's Revenge. For whatever reason y'know. Now I want to go play that and see if he still be shoot the balls.
I miss the days when wish fulfillment also included weird bald shirtless Russian dudes with handlebar mustaches.
You collect items that you can use through out the stage and you also shoot balls at monsters. One of the items is a ladder, which is pretty self-explanatory (you climb it to reach higher spots); another lets you jump higher; there's a bomb which might be for blowing up enemies, I don't know. You also collect "K" blocks which are basically Mario coins. Not sure what they do, but I'm amazed they made all sorts of configurations out of them but still managed to never put three Ks in a row... ahem.
(I take that back)
It plays perfectly fine, you can get pretty powerful pretty fast if you collect three balls to shooty with. I think the weirdest aspect of this is that they brought this guy back as a boss in Bad Dudes vs DragonNinja and made him the last boss in Fighter's Destiny: Karnov's Revenge. For whatever reason y'know. Now I want to go play that and see if he still be shoot the balls.
I miss the days when wish fulfillment also included weird bald shirtless Russian dudes with handlebar mustaches.
CONGRATULATIONS !!
the end
the end
Dumb as hell. Bad NES graphics, music, and gameplay. Not fun or interesting in any regard. And NO, I did not play this to completion.
Although its character has become the mascot of Data East, Karnov is a mostly forgotten title, for understandable reasons. The game was published for arcade, before receiving an NES port, that made some decisions to lower the difficulty of the title. Nevertheless, some more structural problems remained and made the gameplay experience very poor.
The player takes the role of Karnov, whose objective is different from the arcade version; instead of searching for treasure, the protagonist is sent on a quest against evil by God. This black and white approach could be explained by Nintendo's influence, as their titles are still very binary and traditional in their representation of moral conflicts. In any case, Karnov travels through nine stages to defeat a series of monsters, recalling the progression of Castlevania (1986). Unlike the latter, Karnov suffers from an excessively rigid and unnatural design. The lack of variation in the jumps and the strange hitbox - it isn't positioned on the character's sprite, but in front of him - are particularly frustrating, especially as the enemy projectiles are rather fast and hard to see. In the same frustrating fashion, while Karnov can direct the direction of his fall after a jump, he cannot if he drops from a platform. The item system is particularly bad, with players having to cycle through options with the left and right buttons on the D-Pad: it can result in a death, if enemy projectiles are flying around. Worse still, some items can only be used in very specific situations that the game chooses, making progression inelegant.
The game design tries to be non-linear with several possible pathways, but these are of no real interest - since they only yield resources that are never really useful -, all the more so as the game atmosphere does not save it. Karnov is the bastard child of cultural influences inherited from Tengrism and Ancient Greece (temples with caryatids), lacking any real consistency. The game is constantly bathed in sepia colours, a common cliché associated with Central Asia, and not very pleasant to the eye. At the very most, the American port is less punishing than the Famicom version, with its unlimited continues. Nevertheless, Karnov remains a tasteless title, whose execrable playability leaves no memory.
The player takes the role of Karnov, whose objective is different from the arcade version; instead of searching for treasure, the protagonist is sent on a quest against evil by God. This black and white approach could be explained by Nintendo's influence, as their titles are still very binary and traditional in their representation of moral conflicts. In any case, Karnov travels through nine stages to defeat a series of monsters, recalling the progression of Castlevania (1986). Unlike the latter, Karnov suffers from an excessively rigid and unnatural design. The lack of variation in the jumps and the strange hitbox - it isn't positioned on the character's sprite, but in front of him - are particularly frustrating, especially as the enemy projectiles are rather fast and hard to see. In the same frustrating fashion, while Karnov can direct the direction of his fall after a jump, he cannot if he drops from a platform. The item system is particularly bad, with players having to cycle through options with the left and right buttons on the D-Pad: it can result in a death, if enemy projectiles are flying around. Worse still, some items can only be used in very specific situations that the game chooses, making progression inelegant.
The game design tries to be non-linear with several possible pathways, but these are of no real interest - since they only yield resources that are never really useful -, all the more so as the game atmosphere does not save it. Karnov is the bastard child of cultural influences inherited from Tengrism and Ancient Greece (temples with caryatids), lacking any real consistency. The game is constantly bathed in sepia colours, a common cliché associated with Central Asia, and not very pleasant to the eye. At the very most, the American port is less punishing than the Famicom version, with its unlimited continues. Nevertheless, Karnov remains a tasteless title, whose execrable playability leaves no memory.
I really don't know what the setting or story of this game is.
I play as some fat dude and I throw balls at random enemies. It's an action platformer similar to Castlevania, and I believe this is an NES port of an arcade game.
Enemy placements are really cheap, projectiles are fast, level design is just kinda random, it's bad! Your main character, who I'm assuming is Karnov, is really slow and is quite a large target, so avoiding things can be a pain. You can only get hit two times before dying, and a lot of things are really cheaply placed to hit and kill you. This all results in really slow and boring cycles of trial and error.
The music is also very generic and bland, as are the graphics. Nothing of note here, the game is cheap, unfair, and worst of all, boring!
I play as some fat dude and I throw balls at random enemies. It's an action platformer similar to Castlevania, and I believe this is an NES port of an arcade game.
Enemy placements are really cheap, projectiles are fast, level design is just kinda random, it's bad! Your main character, who I'm assuming is Karnov, is really slow and is quite a large target, so avoiding things can be a pain. You can only get hit two times before dying, and a lot of things are really cheaply placed to hit and kill you. This all results in really slow and boring cycles of trial and error.
The music is also very generic and bland, as are the graphics. Nothing of note here, the game is cheap, unfair, and worst of all, boring!
It's a playable action platformer, but nothing about it stands out much.